As SAP accelerates business growth and expansion to new countries there comes a need to deploy additional regional data centers to scale the business. But how do you deploy systems that are more and more complex in areas with ever-changing regulations and compliance issues?

A team from SAP Fieldglass solved this problem by redefining their agile cloud hosting technology solution with hardware, software, and infrastructure that is secure and simple to replicate and maintain. The best-in-class innovative infrastructure solution delivers a low cost, sustainable hyper scale platform.

The team is now a finalist in the 2016 Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award for the Business Networks and Applications Board Area. Learn more:

The quest for a new infrastructure solution began in 2014, shortly after SAP acquired Fieldglass. To quickly and sustainably scale their business, Jeff Basso, vice president of IT for SAP Fieldglass, realized his company needed to change the way its infrastructure was built.

Gone were the days when its four-server-rack infrastructure was good enough. Now to remain competitive in the marketplace, it had to be much smaller, faster, and agile. Basso challenged his team to create a half-server-rack infrastructure.

At the time some engineers didn’t think it was possible, but the team was able to shift perceptions and make it a company effort by working across silos, from networking to virtualization to development.

“Our team took a look at what worked and what did not with our current platform, and then pushed themselves to leave behind old tried and true practices for newer simplified modern ones,” Basso said.

By enrolling engineers to think radically different, the SAP Fieldglass team was able to shrink its four-server-rack solution down to only a half-server-rack solution consisting of just seven servers and two switches.

“The real innovation was having the team control complexity while still delivering a solution that was resilient,” Basso commented.

The reduction of physical components required to deploy and host the SAP Fieldglass solution also results in cost savings of more than 50 percent across all aspects of the business, while delivering higher performance, reducing management efforts, and simplifying auditing. The solution also offers faster delivery timelines and shorter maintenance windows.

“We want to be prepared to run anywhere,” Basso stated. “Our goal is to be able to deploy the whole infrastructure in a weekly basis.”

However, SAP Fieldglass expects its agile infrastructure to only be a part of the bigger solution. They expect the solution to be running everywhere including their new infrastructure, SAP infrastructure, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.

“The design is a stepping stone of our evolution,” Basso declared. “We expect as we give developers an easy to consume platform we will see a different way of thinking emerge, allowing for more possibilities within the SAP Fieldglass application and its ecosystem.”

The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the CEO to an individual or a team.